What does Kermit know, anyways?
Holy crap! A post!
Yes, I know. Shocking isn’t it? I don’t know that anybody even comes here anymore, since the gap between postings has gotten stupidly large.
And wouldn’t you know it, the thing that gets me to write again has to do with gaming. ^.^
I’m sure anybody with an Xbox 360 knows all about Gears of War. If you don’t have a 360 and don’t know what Gears is (or don’t care much), I’ll just say that it’s the best looking 360 game out there right now, and possibly the best looking console game ever.
It also plays damned nice.
Tight controls, tons of enemies, stuff to blow up – what’s not to like? You can play it alone, go online for some multiplayer fun, or – and this is the coolest part – play the single-player campaign online with a friend. Nice!
It’s that last bit that brought about the events that led to this post.
I’m probably the last of the 360 owners I know to get Gears. I’d had other stuff going on, and the Wii was dominating my gaming time, so I wasn’t in any hurry to pick up Gears, despite all the good things I’d heard about it. But, I eventually did. I’d fired it up a few times and done a bit of the single-player campaign, but never got too far. Then Brad suggested some co-op.
Damn, is that fun!
We got on Live together and I hosted the game. He connected and we were off and running. Things were going great – enemies were dying, we were progressing – we were unstoppable!
At least, until my 360 locked up.
No problem. A quick reboot and we were right back in it.
Until my 360 locked up again. Shit.
It was really screwing things up, since I was hosting the game. Once my system froze, Brad got kicked back to the game’s menu and had to wait for me to get back online. Then we’d get things going again and BAM! another lockup.
Fun was not being had by all.
We switched things up and had him host the game. That way, if my system froze again, the game would keep going on his end and I could simply rejoin the mission, already in progress.
That worked, but the situation was still bugging the hell out of me. Why was my system locking up so much? The only time it’d ever done that before was when I was playing the Full Auto demo. (An incident I chalked up to bad code.)
I didn’t figure it out until a few nights later when I was in the middle of a long solo-Gears session. I’d been playing for a couple hours and the game was running fine. What was so different about this time? Did co-op strain the system so much? That didn’t seem right. So why wasn’t I getting lockups?
The heat in the living room was off.
What the hell?
Yes, it seemed the 360 could cope with things just fine at normal room temps, but if the heat was on, the air temperature got to the point that it was too tough for the 360 to keep cool and avoid locking up.
So how to fix this?
Well, I sure wasn’t going to leave my heat off until Winter was over. So that meant something had to be done with the 360. The best solution seemed to be putting better cooling in the system itself. There are all kinds of add-on solutions and replacement fans, designed to keep the system cooler, but I didn’t want anything sticking off the back of the system.
I’d already decided I was going to mod the system once the backup device I wanted came out, so it made sense to take a trial run at opening things up before that time came. And if I was going to open it up, why not go with an internal replacement fan.
Hell, why not go with a whole new case?
I did a lot of reading on replacement cases and fans. I checked out the manufacturers’ pages as well as any reviews I could find. In the end it came down to an XCM case and fans from Talismoon. I didn’t really want extra lights or bling on my system, but I couldn’t find any plain fans.
I ordered the XCM “Halo Green” clear case and Talismoon WhisperFan with green LEDs from Divineo, along with the Xecuter 360 unlock kit. Yeah, I know the XCM case comes with an opening kit, but most reviews said it was kind of flimsy and only good for one opening. I was going to have to open things up again to mod the system, and a friend of mine is interested in modding his too, so it made sense to be able to do this multiple times without having to re-order stuff.
I paid for standard airmail shipping, but for some reason they bumped it up to EMS for no extra charge. Nice! I got my stuff two days later and went to work.
Opening the 360 wasn’t hard at all. I imagine it would’ve been a real pain without the special toolkits, so I’m thankful I had them. The system comes apart nicely, though since a lot of it is held together with plastic clips there are some scary noises while disassembling it. Once I had the 360 apart it was a breeze to swap out the fans and put the new case back on.
I was a bit concerned about having LEDs in the fans, since the 360 sits right at the base of my screen. The projector is plenty bright, but I wasn’t sure how well the image would stand up to some ultra-bright LEDs about 6 inches from the screen.
I needn’t have worried.
The glow from the lights looks really nice (especially when it’s reflecting off the CPU’s heatsink) and doesn’t have any noticeable effect on the projector’s display.
So how’s it look? See for yourself!
The system in near-total darkness:
With the projector on:
And with the room lights on:
Pretty damned spiffy if you ask me! ^.^
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